Trackmania Without End

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Things we don’t talk about much on RPS: deforestation, owls, pudding, longjohns, Sonic the Hedgehog, and cars. Well, let’s fix that latter at least.

A car game we can all get behind is smashy finger-steering fun ’em up Trackmania. On April 16th, the latest version, Trackmania Nations Forever is to be released. And it’s free! Free! Free like the pudding-soiled longjohns Sonic the Hedgehog would doubtless donate to a shivering owl left homeless by deforestation!

Hopefully we’ll be talking about it loads come the day, but meantime here’s the new trailer:

I loved (and completed) the original TM but the last two (Sunrise and United) just got way too hard after the half-way point. Either they’re catering more to hardcore racing fans or my hand-eye coordination isn’t what it used to be.

The Trackmania engine runs great even on mid-to-low end machines. I had an older laptop it ran fine on. You tune down the pretty details, like motion blur, and you’re fine.

Online is great because it’s not bumper cars like other racers, instead – you are just racing for best time and coolest stunts. Other players on the track at the same time are shown as ghosts, so you just pass through them, thus saving tons of CPU cycles and bandwidth.

I’m glad Nadeo decided to drop StarForce, and also a bit puzzled, since Florent (Nadeo’s boss) thought that StarForce was “the perfect neon to keep away some people having dumb behavior from the community” (referring to people that said that SF was bad an over the top).

A broken burner in my old machine says otherwise.

That’s Nadeo: great games, not so great people.

Edit after Forceflow’s comment: so does it have SF or not?. I was thinking about buying TMU, but I will definitely not if it has StarForce. I have dumb behaviour, you know.

Uh, apologies for the harsh tone of that last message. I’ve been a fan of TrackMania since the early days (I got hooked on the betademo of the first game), and the constant attacks from the anti-starforce brigade has taken it’s toll. It’s so tiresome that _every single time_ someone starts discussing my favourite modern game, the discussion eventually turns into a Starforce-argument. So I’m probably a little too touchy on the subject.

fluffy – that new content looks nice. Definitely looking forward to that. Hopefully we won’t see a raft of Nations-capable servers clogging up the serverlisting in United tho…still want to play my Desert and Alpine tracks. (Or ‘challenges’ as the game insists on calling em)
Btw – what’s your ingame name?

Fluffy – perhaps there’s a reason for that, but I’m glad Nadeo dropped SF (or allowed Steam to sell the game without it at least). I also got tired of being jumped upon in the official forums just because I said that SF was cumbersome and useless (in addition to plain bad for your computer).